We are the David Wilson Library Research Services Team. Helping researchers with everything from literature searching to open research to publication impact. Blogging items of interest to PGRs, ECRs and researchers.

I've currently working through the free 'How to survive your PhD' course being run by Doctor Inger Mewburn (thesiswhisperer) and colleagues via ANU.
Last week the topic of the live chat centered around confidence and impostor syndrome.

Here's some tips I picked up from the live chat:

How do you know if you're suffering from impostor syndrome or just being self-critical? = When the self critiquing becomes debilitating.It's useful to be critical of your own practices and do some self-reflection, but not to the point that it paralyses you or you lose sight of what you're trying to achieve.Dealing with a PhD thesis can be like dealing with an unruly child! Parents often feel impostor syndrome too.Build your confidence by identifying what’s good about your work.You're not the only one feeling this way - it’s not unusual to struggle with a PhDAll academics struggle at one time or another and no-one is perfect. There is no perfect research journey.You may feel…

The course is open to anyone: PhD students, supervisors, friends and family, support staff etc. I'm hoping by taking part I can get some insight into how to support PhD students better.

The main theme of the course is surviving the emotional journey of a research degree. A PhD can feel like a long, hard, often lonely, struggle. It can also be exciting and joyful and stressful and a whole gamut of other feelings along the way!

Even if you're not taking part you can see some of the discussion on Twitter via #survivephd15

Here's some of the thoughts and tips I picked up from the first live chat of the course:

What if your supervisor doesn't seem invested/interested in you?Find another supervisor who is! Not always an option and changing supervisors can be like going through a divorce, but it's a very important relationship …

As it’s recently had a redesign I thought we would look at Academia.edu this week. Founded in 2008 it provides an online platform for sharing academic research. Academia hosts around 6,484,290 papers and attracts 36 million unique visitors a month. It’s free to sign up and creating a profile is straightforward. Once you have a profile, you can share as much or as little personal information as you like. Papers can be found in two ways. First, you can follow research interests. Academia then generates a personal news feed that highlights papers tagged with your research interests. Second, you can follow individual academics: every time they upload a paper it appears in your feed. In my experience, it’s good for three things: Finding and sharing research. Academia has become a depository of research publications, rather like our own LRA. Many researchers use it to host their own publications archive. It’s become a good way to find ‘grey literature’ like conference or working papers. Netw…